


exit stage left

by w_ren



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cannibalism, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Serial Killers, gormogon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 20:21:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1198377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/w_ren/pseuds/w_ren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zack knows the truth -- but that doesn't mean that he agrees with it.</p><p> </p><p>(A justification of the Gormogon arc.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	exit stage left

“... When our experiments blew up, it was easy to place the blame on him ...”

 

 

 

Zack sees Jason's picture in the records Angela brings up for Booth on the computer (has seen him in the driveway a few times, leaning on the gates smoking a cigarette or kicking at gravel), finds that second set of tooth marks, and he knows everything.

 

 

 

 

Zack is not who he was when he left – every flaw of him is highlighted, bright, from the childish print of his tees to his inability to maintain eye contact, and for the first time in years he remembers to hate himself, for not being what the military wanted, for never living up to scratch. His time at the Jeffersonian had made him forget how much he didn't know about people, just how great the divide between him and the rest of the world was. He hates that everything he is has been deemed worthless by other people, that all of the work he's put into his degrees isn't ever going to be enough to make up for his lack of social skills.

 

Being back is all he ever wanted, needed; it's family disguised as colleagues, he's loved rather than tolerated, and he can't let it go, can't ever go back.

 

He will do anything to protect this.

 

 

 

 

When he's invited to share his knowledge of the symbolism, Jack struts into the vault like he owns the place, right in front of Zack, even makes eye contact with him briefly before he begins talking.

 

He's always so excited to have an audience for his ramblings. It's a few things he's mentioned to Zack before – the Illuminati, of course, Freemasons and the Widow's son and sacrifice, though he drops in aliens and a few other bits and bobs that Zack knows are just to emphasise the harmlessness of his conspiracy theories, the more comical aspects.

 

Zack doesn't know a lot about psychology, though he doesn't hold it in the same disdain as Dr. Brennan. Listening to Jack wax lyrical about scapegoats and offerings, proud of himself, voice the same as when he crowned himself king of the lab, makes his toes curl in his shoes.

 

It takes time to work up the courage to say something. He isn't smart about it, which is novel for him. It's only when the two of them are standing in the privacy of Zack's garage, Hodgin's eyes wide and Zack's angry and accusing, does it occur to him that Hodgin's is a murderer, might take him down to protect his identity.

 

“Are you going to kill me?” he asks. The garage is cool and dark, luxury cars shining like huge, misshapen beetles in rows on either side of him. It smells like gas and cleaning fluids. He wonders if this room ever reminds Hodgins of being kidnapped.

 

“That depends,” says Jack. A rough hand settles on Zack's shoulder. “Do you think I'm capable of killing you?”

And Zack – he knows the answer should be yes. Jason was Hodgin's trusted subordinate, his progeny, and he ended up gutted like a fish in a lonely cell. It should be no work at all for Hodgins to recreate that with a fresh new victim. This is the truth, this is logical; Zack is his best friend, but that doesn't mean he isn't made of meat like the rest of the world.

 

The hand on his shoulder is warm, though. Zack is not sentimental but he is trusting. Like everyone else he is weak to his emotions, he just has to deal with them so rarely, is unused to resisting them. He leans against the other body in the dark, weak under the weight of a secret he never, ever wanted. “I don't know,” he says. “Do you think I'm capable of turning you in?”

 

Hodgins smiles. It isn't a truce -- neither is able to compromise -- but it follows the same sorts of rules.

 

 

 

 

“What are you doing at my workstation?” asks Zack. He says it with a frown, mouth drawn tight like he already knows the answer.

 

Jack, shamefully, jumps in his boots. He glances over his shoulder at Zack, before turning around fully and leaning with one hip against the tall desk. He folds his arms and composes himself quickly. “Waiting for you,” he lies. “Or have you forgotten who drives you to and from work every day?”

 

For a moment, Zack just stares at him. “You explicitly told me to take the bus home because you were going to be working late.” His eyes narrow. Jack can practically hear the cogs turning in Zack's head, information arranging just so until he's certain of the facts. “You were going to take my security pass, weren't you,” he says quietly.

 

“No.”

 

“Yes. You know that I keep my spare card in that specific drawer and you ignored all other areas of the workstation, indicating a definitive target, and it's my only valuable item. The most logical assumption, then, would be that you wanted it – to get into Limbo, presumably. While I'm sure your clearance is high enough, it would be a suspicious place for you to be recorded as entering, particularly at this time of night. In contrast, I'm in and out of it daily, and my entrance would be innocuous enough to go unnoticed.” His mouth turns downwards and he sighs slightly. “I'm going to preserve my image of our friendship by telling me that the frequency of my access, and thus the innocence of it, was a factor in your decision.”

 

“Look, Zack – buddy – I'm not trying to set you up or anything. I just need to borrow it.” So that he can hide bodies in the shelves.

 

Zack glares at him – or tries to, at least; he's never quite managed an expression more antagonistic than a weak scowl – before, surprisingly, unclipping the ID card from his lab coat pocket and shoving it towards Jack. “You're my best friend, and I like to think of you as a good man. Please do the right thing.”

 

It's a clumsy attempt at a guilt trip – sweet, almost, and sickeningly naive – but Jack still hesitates, for a moment. He knows what Zack is trying to do.

 

He takes the plastic card.

 

 

 

 

See, that's the secret to squints like Zack and Brennan; humanity. It's always shaken Jack a little bit, seeing that side of them, so rarely exposed. In the face of all of his rationalism and empiricism and cold, hard logic, there was a daunting faith in humanity, in people, a desperate idealist held back by nitrile gloves and safety goggles.

 

It was almost infuriating to Jack – seeing Zack put Booth on a pedestal as the perfect example of a man, admire the justice and the truth and the law of him while ignoring the fact that these characteristics were only significant in the way they shone against a backdrop of a rotten population. It was one part envy, two parts pure vitriol; how could Zack find it in himself to have such faith in a dirty, disgusting system, praise Booth, the clean-cut Superman, and yet regard Jack with such contempt? For all of his intelligence Zack was as deluded as the rest of them – they both knew Seeley had been a sniper, had killed dozens of times before. Where did Zack get off pretending each of those targets had been justified? How could he tell himself there was more justice to Booth's government-sanctioned takedowns, unrecorded and unaccounted or, than there were for Jack's sacrifices?

 

It hurt him, that Zack was just like the rest of the world, in this at least. It hurt them both.

 

 

 

 

“Why haven't you told anyone about your suspicions?” Jack asks. He doesn't like to bring it up – like if he just doesn't mention it for a week or two, Zack will forget – but the question has been eating at him ever since Zack made the accusation.

 

“I don't have suspicions. I know,” Zack corrects, not turning around. He's on his hands and knees, digging about under the couch for the remote – Jack is never sure how he manages to lose it in a living room the size of a shoebox, especially with his apparently infinite memory, but the wonders of Zack never cease.

 

“Fine, then. If you _know_ , oh great omnipotent being that you are, why not tell?”

 

“Because if you turn yourself in, maybe the courts will be lenient on you. And while I don't like the idea of manipulating the legal system, I imagine anthropophagy to be a brilliant basis upon which to build a case for mental incompetence, an endeavour which can only be negatively impacted by your ongoing attempts to outwit law enforcement – while I don't quite grasp the details of criminal psychology, I would think that turning yourself in while you appear to have the upper hand would indicate disorganisation characteristic of an impaired criminal, and at this point, you are at the advantage if you intend to open yourself up to negotiations.”

 

“Of course, this is all only relevant in a hypothetical universe in which I _am_ the Gormogon killer.”

 

Zack huffs and switches on the old TV. It is a sign of the change that has occurred in their relationship that this conversation has not immediately been derailed by a rant about either string theory or Bizarro-world Batman. “It's not hypothetical. It's this one.”

 

 

 

 

The way Zack sees it -- one of them has to give in. Either Hodgins will confess, or Zack will -- well. One of them has to break, is the point, and Zack knows when the time comes, everything will change. He's almost more angry at Hodgins for that than for the murder -- it's selfish and he knows that his mother would be disappointed, but he needs the team, needs Jack more than he needs the victims to be alive and Jack is taking them away from him, making it so that every moment at the Jeffersonian is spent testing his commitment to this lie that the two of them are wilfully perpetuating, where everyone is happy and no one is insane.

 

Zack is desperate, desperate to believe it, though. It was the only thing that made Iraq survivable -- the knowledge that somewhere, Angela was trying to explain human emotions to Dr. Brennan as she sometimes did for him, that Naomi was ordering Grandes at Starbucks that she could never finish, that Booth was somehow making reading comics cool in a way that Zack had been unable to achieve, and Jack was off not murdering people and eating them. He's never in these fantasies -- it's difficult enough for him to imagine hypothetical, yet likely scenarios, next to impossible for him to lie entirely about the characters on-stage (his fantasies were even time-accurate, accounting for the eight-hour difference between Iraq and DC so that everything was synchronised to his friend's standard schedule, otherwise immersion in the charade was impossible) -- but they still make him feel safe. He used to do the same thing when he moved out of Wisconsin, though of course there were more players then.

 

He knows that he should do something about Jack but he can't, he can't, knows that his life depends on it, not just in the empty implied threats Hodgins had tossed out during their conversation but in his willingness to relinquish this fantasy that he relies so heavily on.

 

 

 

 

 

It isn't that Booth's a bad guy. If anything, the problem is that he's too good – he's a modern-day Superman, a chiselled jaw and a good suit, morally infallible, an absolute, Nietzsche's Ubermensch. He never seems to falter, not in any meaningful way, and it pisses Jack off – that Zack could see Booth as the epitome of True Good while Jack, who worked by the sweat of his brow to keep his country safe, to fight the good fight, was a criminal.

 

He still remembers overhearing, through the door, at his own wedding, _“more about duty and honour than anyone else,”_ and hating Zack for it.

 

 

 

 

Booth pries open the mausoleum door with a crowbar. The sound of the centuries-old metalwork crying out with the strain sets Jack's teeth on edge – the work of his predecessors, desecrated – but he can't think of a reason for Booth to not do it quick enough.

 

 

 

 

“So they identified your next victim,” says Zack, leaning over the steel bench and squinting at Hodgins. This is the face he makes when he's trying his best to interpret other people's body language. “ _And_ they have your skeleton. How does that effect your future plans?”

 

“I'm not a serial killer, Zack.”

 

“That's a lie.”

 

“But it's what you want to hear, isn't it?” Hodgins snaps, and Zack is silent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It takes Jack a while to catch onto what Zack is doing. It only really clicks after he tests the flesh and is able to match it to a water source, admitting that it's from his neighbourhood, even though he prepared it in a separate house well out of the area. He corners him during lunch – it feels like a conversation to be had at midnight in a rainy parking lot beneath a broken street lamp, but instead they have it under a fluorescent light in a sterile-smelling storage room.

 

“You're framing yourself,” he hisses, half a question and half a frustrated declaration. "You messed with my samples."

 

“Only conforming to your own established set up,” corrects Zack. He's always _correcting_ , always knows better, always digging at the fucking truth like a scab.

 

“I'm not trying to – You said you understood about going into Limbo --” There isn't an accurate description for the mix of fury and confusion Jack is experiencing at the moment. He wants to shove Zack against a steel shelf and demand that he explain. He doesn't. “ _Why?_ ”

 

Zack shrugs – actually shrugs, like this isn't a big deal at all, but then he gives Jack an uncharacteristically direct look, the kind of look that means something. “I think you're a good man. You're my friend. You might have killed me so that I couldn't expose you, but you clearly value my life over your safety. If you don't confess, I'll probably go to jail for crimes that I didn't commit – but, you will, and so I won't.”

 

“You wouldn't last long in prison,” Jack tries to say, except instead of “wouldn't” he says “won't”, and there's a beat of silence in which they both realise what is going to happen, what is happening, and it's just an accident of semantics, isn't it, but they're in too deep to go back now.

 

 

 

 

It quickly falls apart, and Jack knows how to stop it but he knows he isn't going to.

 

 

 

 

“Anything else?”

 

“Yes. It must be killing him that you have this, his whole reason for living –”

 

And yes, it is, it aches like a deep bruise, or a burn, maybe, skin tight from the heat. He imagines that this is what phantom limb syndrome must feel like, this absence, an untouchable ache, with his skeleton hidden away from him, and Jason in a morgue somewhere, and everything he's worked for coming down around him.

 

And Zack, always, always knowing.

 

 

 

 

Sometime around nine o'clock at night, Zack wanders over to Jack's desk. He doesn't say anything to Jack – even shushes him when he starts to talk – just pulls out his phone and rings speed dial three.

 

“Dr. Brennan, it's me, Zack, I've found something in the Gormogon vault that I think you should see … Who's that?” He looks a bit confused for a moment, before pocketing his phone.

 

“Care to explain?” Jack drawls, setting down the papers he's holding.

 

Zack just holds up the goofy night-vision goggles in his hand and smiles. “I have greater than average spatial reasoning.”

 

 

 

 

Seeing Brennan's ham-fisted acting, and Booth's marginally better attempt, is almost enough to make Jack confess just so that he can show everyone the tape.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack's new apprentice is a pretty forgettable guy – a friend of Jason's, he thinks – but he rides a motorcycle, is desperately looking for a place in the world, and is willing to eat human flesh right off the bone if it helps him find it, so he's deemed acceptable. The truth is, he's a vulnerable guy – of course he is, that's how this part works, he needs guidance and a purpose and it's Jack's responsibility to give it to him.

 

Like Jason (like Zack, a little, before his haircut and if you squinted), Derek is tall and skinny, a brunette with longer hair than most, pretty in just the right light.

 

Plus, he lets Jack rip out all of his teeth using only a pair of pliers and finely aged whiskey for anaesthesia, so there's that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I need to borrow your security pass again,” says Jack, a few hours before he's planned to meet with Derek, and he ignores the upset, tight-mouthed look Zack gives him when he hands it over with a huff.

 

“I like to think that you're a good man,” mutters Zack under his breath as Jack walks away. Jack pretends not to hear.

 

 

 

They only fuck once, but Jack remembers it clearly. Zack is better than he expected, especially with his mouth, and when Hodgins comments on it a little crudely he makes some offhand remark about being a years-too-young scholarship student with zero social skills and even less money at a private school where everyone was a rich alpha-male type that leaves Hodgins feeling uncomfortable. Under his strange, juvenile outfits he's stronger than Jack expected, with a thick, curved cock and long legs that he never seems to know what to do with, and he leaves bite marks that Hodgins would later have to desperately hide from Angela. He thinks Zack might be punishing him, or maybe trying to manipulate him like a Bond girl; screwing the murderlust out of him.

 

It doesn't work, obviously. Hodgins tries to tell Zack that with his body, with every move; he makes it hurt as much as he can get away with, plays the bully. This is not lovemaking, this is a fight, as much as everything between them is nowadays. Hodgins wins.

 

Spread across his mattress, he amuses himself by watching Zack shuffle back into his clothes and carefully avoid eye contact. "And to think," he says, "We could have been doing that for years."

 

"No we couldn't."

 

 Hodgins raises an eyebrow. "What, you're only attracted to me now that you're convinced that I'm some sort of serial cannibal?"

 

Zack pauses in the doorway. "No. I was just never willing to jeopardise one of my few meaningful relationships to satisfy a carnal desire." He even tries to make a judgemental face, which is clearly an imitation of one of Angela's expressions. Hodgins laughs him out of the room.

 

"I can't believe you tried to use sex as a weapon!" he calls out as Zack stomps away in the direction of the front door.

 

 

 

He passes Zack on the mezzanine, curled up on the couch with a Cup-a-Soup, but when Jack attempts to say hello, Zack interrupts him with an odd declaration. “I'm going to use argon to delay the reaction of the phosphorous and open up the boxes,” he informs Jack. “It would help if you told me which box is most significant, so as to save time and minimise risk of damage to myself or the evidence.”

 

Jack just scowls and stomps away.

 

  

 

 

“A slight issue has arisen,” Zack informs him, making his best 'serious face'. Jack just cocks an eyebrow and leans back against the railing, arms folded, waiting for Zack to continue.

 

“Sweets says that Gormogon – and his apprentice – are widow's sons, just as their victims are. Your own father, of course, died eighteen years ago of acute myeloid leukaemia. However, my father is still alive, thus disqualifying me as a suspect.”

 

“Didn't your old man have a stroke last year?” asks Jack without thinking. He's lucky that Zack seems unable to take offence, because the younger man just nods and looks thoughtful.

 

“Yes, caused by an arterial embolism. It left him paralysed and suffering from a great deal of neurological damage, and thus unable to function to his original capacity as a father figure. Perhaps if the definition of a widow's son was broadened to include merely losing one's father, rather than literal death, my potential as a suspect can be re-established. I imagine Dr. Sweets would make that change upon reading my records. And the relative freshness of that trauma could only serve to reinforce the idea that I'm the killer.” Zack gives him a satisfied nod, and for a moment Jack is tempted to sock him in the jaw because really, how stupid can one person be, but he doesn't, just stands and grabs his coat.

 

“Come on, genius. If we leave now, we can get take out from the Royal.”

 

He gets a text from Derek on the way out – ' _all done_ ' – but he doesn't reply.

 

 

 

 

 

“Dr. Brennan was right,” says Zack, voice one-third of the way to forlorn. “We aren't in her book at all.”

 

Instead of answering, Jack just grunts. Rather than breaking off at his own door, Zack has trailed him all of the way to the main house and into the stately kitchen. Jack doesn't mind because he's got a plastic baggy of takeaway Thai in his hands – the Royal had closed moments before their arrival, to his chagrin, but that doesn't mean he won't thoroughly enjoy his chicken pad siew.

 

“Are you still angry that she called you a virgin?” he asks after a moment. Zack shrugs.

 

“I was never angry about that. The tallying of sexual conquests is an act of male posturing that has never appealed to me. I was speaking more in the sense that the characters do not accurately represent – us. They simply represent her perceived reality of us. However the truth is that Dr. Brennan does not know all of us, and even if she could her representation would inevitably be biased. She has only been able to capture – an idea of us, perhaps, an impression.”

 

The lid of the container opens with a crack. Jack foregoes a proper bowl, simply digs around in the drawer for a fork and starts eating. “What brought on this unusually deep analysis of the good doctor's literary works?” he says around a mouthful of flat noodle and chicken.

 

“In the novel 'Stretched Bonds', they arrest the killer, William Gauld, only for his attorney to get him out almost immediately because of the allegations of evidence mishandling directed at Dr. Reich's team. Soon after, though, Dr. Walsh – Dr. Brennan's attempt to depict you, though she denies it – comes across evidence suggesting that the vigilante introduced at the end of the previous book, Mr. Red, is going to come after him. As a result Walsh is faced with an ultimatum; reveal his suspicion, have Gauld taken into police protection and saved, or remain silent and thus be complicit in Gauld's murder."

  

“So either Gauld is punished for the murders or he isn't. Not a tough call.”

 

Zack frowns at him. “Walsh realises that, if he were to neglect his duty as an upholder and enforcer of US law and standards of morality, even if it was the only way that Gauld would be punished, he would be ruining himself. That even if it was for the right reasons, to be an accessory to the taking of another human life would be unforgivable, that only by following the law could true justice be served. He reveals what he has found out.”

 

“You're right,” says Jack, snorting. “Brennan did get it all wrong.”

 

 

 

 

“But … The markings were made by --”

 

“Dentures, they were made by dentures.”

  
Zack stares at him. “Dentures made of human teeth. Cuspids. You want me to lie and say that they were made of a synthetic material that you've found traces of?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“No, I am not going to do that. That's interfering with the investigation, I won't do that.”

 

"You manipulated my samples before. How is this different?" This is where Jack plays his trump card. “Do you want to know who's next on the Gormogon's list?” he asks, then falls silent for a moment as one of the interns from a different department ducks into the kitchen for a glass of water. The two of them watch her leave the room, and through the glass door and wall they can see people from all branches of the Jeffersonian, moving and talking. Zack looks back at him and Hodgin's smiles, looking just a little bit sad. “Neither do I. But he has to get into the Jeffersonian somehow, doesn't he?”

 

Zack turns and marches out of the room, but Hodgins knows that he's won.

 

 

 

 

Sacrifices have to be made; that's okay, Zack understands. There was really only ever one way this could have played out, anyhow.

 

 

 

 

Zack closes his eyes and rests his forehead against the cool, thick plastic of the safety shield.

 

“What are you going?” asks Jack, trying not to sound as panicked as he feels.

 

“When I was little, my mother sent me to occupational therapy three days a week. I used to – have habits, unbecoming habits, such as wearing multiple pairs of socks and not speaking for days and refusing to eat yellow foods or food where the condiment was put on top of the meal rather than to the side,” Zack says, eyes still closed, and Jack doesn't say anything. It's so rare for Zack to share things like this, his childhood, in anything other than general terms. “I hated it when someone would touch something of mine, or touched me when I wasn't expecting it. I had panic attacks regularly throughout primary and middle school. I'm mostly able to deal with that sort of thing now, but am aware that my treatment of my workspace could probably be considered territorial.”

 

“Oh,” says Jack, “I see,” and he does, literally, see, the muscles in Zack's jaw tighten, his teeth clench.

 

“Not to mention making me lie about the dentures.” He takes a deep breath out and opens his eyes, adding the next compound to the mix and stirring slowly with the fine glass rod. “I'd like to say that I don't know what will happen, but it would be insulting to both of our intelligences. I presume your _apprentice_ is ready to go, then?”

 

“Derek knows what to do, yes,” mutters Jack. His fingers twitch and he leans towards Zack a little. “You know you really should put the –”

 

Zack actually stops completely, though, holding the next cylinder between two pinched fingers. “You're okay with this happening to me, of course you are, it's your plan.”

 

“It'll be worse the more you let it simmer like this,” grinds out Jack. He's flooded with nausea, like he's swallowed a handful of marbles. Zack could easily get him arrested at this point – hell, at any point within the last few months – and it had been a stupid risk, but frankly everything that he'd done in regards to the case had been incredibly risky, and he was just taking advantage of a situation that Zack himself had created with his god damn lying.

 

“Don't act concerned, I know it's faked. It wouldn't be bad at all if you hadn't done this.” He glances at Jack out of the corner of his eye, the smaller flicker in his direction. “It still doesn't have to be.”

 

It's a lie, and they both know it. Jack doesn't look away when Zack lets the next tube tip, but can't bring himself to look at Zack's hands, broken and bloody, while he screams.

 

 

 

 

He vomits in a hospital bathroom; Angela rubs soothing circles along his sides, kisses the nape of his neck. He wipes his mouth and eyes and then spends the next few hours in an uncomfortable plastic chair, hating Zack with everything he has and loving him for everything he is.

 

 

 

 

Every moment in the hospital room is spent afraid. Afraid that Zack will get worse. Afraid that Zack will reveal it all. Afraid that Zack will finally get it through his thick skull that this isn't going to work, that he can't stop Jack, that people like him don't stop until they're dead or captured. People like him don't put their friends above their purpose.

 

He thinks that Zack intended it as a test. He knows that he's failed. But he isn't sure if, now knowing that he's wrong about their friendship, Zack will tell. This is their end game, but he doesn't know the rules.

 

The worst part is the sympathy. Angela smothers him with it – wraps her arms around him from behind, breasts pressed to his back, lips at his ear. “It isn't your fault,” she says, means it, means _there isn't anything you could have done, it's going to be okay,_ and it's the irony that kills him, that brings him to tears. Angela and Zack are alike in many ways, when you know them as well as he does, when you love them both like he does, but she doesn't see like he does, doesn't smell the blood on his breath. Jack drinks up her beauty like it's the only thing he's ever needed, takes everything he can from her desperately because he knows, he knows he doesn't deserve it. He kisses her in a supply closet, roughly, and she's all curves and substance, but he reads Zack in her sharp nails in his back and in the sounds she makes when he bites at her neck.

 

They sit beside each other in the hospital room, two people poisoned by his lies and his love, and Jack hates himself, but there is no going back for people like him.

 

 

 

 

Derek calls him, and when he picks the phone up Hodgin's is immediately privy to the sound of vomiting, the kid gagging and choking on his own sick. “Dr. Hodgins--” he sobs into the phone between gasps of breath, “Dr. Hodgins I think something is wrong with me --”

 

Even driving double the speed limit, Jack isn't there in time. Derek's dead on the bathroom floor of the shitty little studio apartment he lives in, whatever poison Zack has managed to dose him with working with a cruel efficiency. Hodgins wonders when, how, why, but he doesn't get any answers, because even now he doesn't understand Zack.

 

Any sadness over Derek's death is gone by the time he's disposed of the corpse. He wonders which is worse; what he's done to Zack's hands, or what he's done to Zack's head.

 

 

 

 

He pumps Zack up with too much morphine to be lucid. He doesn't know which one of them he's protecting.

 

 

 

 

Dr. Brennan is a moment of sense in his life, the first pure thought Zack's had in an age. He wishes that she'd come sooner, but it doesn't matter now. She touches his wrist, just above the gauze, and he can't look away from her. “All of your assumptions are built on a first principle, Zack – to wit, the historical human experience as a whole is more important than a single person's life.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Yet you risked it all so you wouldn't hurt Hodgins.”

 

And therein lies the rub.

 

 

 

 

Zack cries when he confesses, turns his head to the side like he's ashamed of what he's done.

 

What Hodgins isn't expecting is the address that he rattles off, only a block or two away from Hodgin's estate.

 

 

 

He's picked his victim well; the “Master”, or at least the one they find, is an old associate of Arthur Graves, with a recorded history of juvenile delinquency and mental illness, no family, and a tendency towards living off-the-grid. Hodgins has no idea how Zack found him. There's a second corpse, half cooked and eaten.

 

The Master leapt out at them, Booth writes on a report that Hodgins later obtains; he was killed with one shot to the head. The autopsy found human remains in his stomach that matched the corpse, which is unable to be identified due to the damage it's sustained.

 

(Zack later admits that he purchased it from a less-than-honest crematorium and cooked it himself.

 

The Master has been drugged to him eyeballs, unable to tell up from down, and locked in that room since Hodgins made him lie about the dentures, waiting. The lock is destroyed when Booth kicks down the door. The Master is just a casualty, not trying to attack but trying to escape, eating the corpse only to avoid starvation; he is a victim of Zack's love for Jack, for the team, and nothing more.

 

Zack might be more messed up than Jack himself, but at least he's aware that what he's done is wrong.)

 

“No one will know it was you,” Zack says when he breaks out. He's leaning against one of Jack's more expensive cars, down in the garage under his old apartment. Hodgins wonders if Zack knows that he's been sleeping in the other's bed since they took him into custody.

 

Hodgins punches him in the face, then grabs him by the arms and kisses him hard. “Why,” he asks, “You fucking lunatic, _why_ ,” and Zack doesn't smile or look sad or pull away or lean in. He touches his bleeding lip. Shrugs.

 

“One of us had to give in,” he says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

– Kurt Vonnegut

**Author's Note:**

> I have been meaning to write a different explanation for the Gormogon arc ever since I watched it when it first happened and never did, and then I decided that I'd write this before uni started again, which is why it seems a bit rushed … I should have really re-watched the season but I didn't because I'm bad so I am not sure how accurate half of this is? If you see any ridiculous errors in plot or in logic please, please tell me so that I can fix them!


End file.
